Work And Family Commitments Of Low Income And Impoverished Women

Author : Judith Hennessy
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739186809
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Work and Family Commitments of Low-Income and Impoverished Women written by Judith Hennessy and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-03-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflict between work and family life is an all too familiar experience for many Americans. The difficult choices facing women who combine paid work with childcare are the subject of a deluge of books and articles in addition to an ongoing public debate about how women and men should balance their work and family commitments. Although we know a great deal about the social and cultural environment fueling these contradictions among middle-class and upper middle class women, we know little about the forces that influence poor and low-income women. Work and Family Commitments of Low-Income and Impoverished Women addresses this omission and gives voice to women in poverty as it traces the moral and cultural structures that help shape the meaning and value of paid work and motherhood among a group of mothers who rely on welfare or a combination of low-wage work and welfare to provide and care for their families. This portrayal of poor women’s lives rarely enters the work-life debate over women’s choices, generally characterized as between mothers who have to work versus those who choose to. Judith Hennessy puts low-income women front and center to shed light on less explored aspects of the moral and cultural foundations of contemporary work and family conflict from interviews and survey data of a group of low-income and poor mothers on and off welfare. Hennessey explores the paradox in American society where combining paid work with caring for children continues to generate considerable ambivalence (and often guilt) on the part of married middle-class mothers for devoting too much time to paid work and supposedly neglecting their children. While poor and working class mothers who might otherwise rely on welfare are relegated to working at low-wage jobs outside the home in fulfillment of their family responsibilities.

Author : Sharon Hays
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780195176018
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Flat Broke with Children written by Sharon Hays and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.

Author : Heidi I. Hartmann
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135803234
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women, Work, and Poverty written by Heidi I. Hartmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Find out how welfare reform has affected women living at the poverty level Women, Work, and Poverty presents the latest information on women living at or below the poverty level and the changes that need to be made in public policy to allow them to rise above their economic hardships. Using a wide range of research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, small-scale surveys, and analysis of personnel records, the book explores different aspects of women’s poverty since the passage of the 1986 welfare reform bill. Anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and social workers examine marriage, divorce, children and child care, employment and work schedules, disabilities, mental health, and education, and look at income support programs, such as welfare and unemployment insurance. Women, Work, and Poverty illuminates the changes in the causes of women’s poverty following welfare reform in the United States, using up-to-date research that’s both qualitative and quantitative. Taking racial and ethnic diversity into account, the book’s contributors examine new findings on the feminization of poverty, the role of children and the lack of child care as an obstacle to employment, labor market policies that can reduce poverty and improve gender wage equality, sex and race segregation in the labor market, and the low quality of jobs available to low income women. Women, Work, and Poverty examines: marriage, motherhood, and work pay equity and living wage reforms community resources welfare status and child care acquiring higher education advancing women of color income security repaying debt after divorce gender differences in spendable income women’s job loss Women, Work, and Poverty is an invaluable aid for academics working in social work, social policy, women’s studies, economics, sociology, and political science, and for policy researchers, anti-poverty activists, and women’s leaders.

Author : Ajay Chaudry
Publisher : Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN 13 : 1610441192
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Putting Children First written by Ajay Chaudry and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2004-07-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the five years following the passage of federal welfare reform law, the labor force participation of low-income, single mothers with young children climbed by more than 25 percent. With significantly more hours spent outside the home, single working mothers face a serious childcare crunch—how can they provide quality care for their children? In Putting Children First, Ajay Chaudry follows 42 low-income families in New York City over three years to illuminate the plight of these mothers and the ways in which they respond to the difficult challenge of providing for their children’s material and developmental needs with limited resources. Using the words of the women themselves, Chaudry tells a startling story. Scarce subsidies, complicated bureaucracies, inflexible work schedules, and limited choices force families to piece together care arrangements that are often unstable, unreliable, inconvenient, and of limited quality. Because their wages are so low, these women are forced to rely on inexpensive caregivers who are often under-qualified to serve the developmental needs of their children. Even when these mothers find good, affordable care, it rarely lasts long because their volatile employment situations throw their needs into constant flux. The average woman in Chaudry’s sample had to find five different primary caregivers in her child’s first four years, while over a quarter of them needed seven or more in that time. This book lets single, low-income mothers describe the childcare arrangements they desire and the ways that options available to them fail to meet even their most basic needs. As Chaudry tracks these women through erratic childcare spells, he reveals the strategies they employ, the tremendous costs they incur and the anxiety they face when trying to ensure that their children are given proper care. Honest, powerful, and alarming, Putting Children First gives a fresh perspective on work and family for the disadvantaged. It infuses a human voice into the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of welfare reform, showing the flaws of a social policy based solely on personal responsibility without concurrent societal responsibility, and suggesting a better path for the future.

Author : Amanda Freeman
Publisher : The New Press
ISBN 13 : 1620977710
Total Pages : 115 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Getting Me Cheap written by Amanda Freeman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two groundbreaking sociologists explore the way the American dream is built on the backs of working poor women Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers—primarily women—who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid. While these women tend to the needs of well-off families, their own children frequently step into premature adult roles, providing care for siblings and aging family members. Based on years of in-depth field work and hundreds of eye-opening interviews, Getting Me Cheap explores how America traps millions of women and their children into lives of stunted opportunity and poverty in service of giving others of us the lives we seek. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickle and Dimed for its revelatory glimpse into how our society functions behind the scenes, Getting Me Cheap also offers a way forward—with both policy solutions and a keen moral vision for organizing women across class lines.

Author : Joel F. Handler
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131746981X
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hard Labor written by Joel F. Handler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth view of the world of low-wage women workers, this expert presentation by authors actively involved in the field provides a realistic picture of the women and the issues as well as suggested strategies and innovations. The book covers a wide range of topics, including getting and keeping a job, struggling to balance the demands of work and family, health care, child care, and unemployment. It is set in the context of both welfare reform and the low-wage labor market and incorporates both self-employment and micro-business enterprise.

Author : Jane Henrici
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 9780816525126
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Doing Without written by Jane Henrici and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2006-10-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The welfare reform legislation enacted in 1996 was applauded by many for the successes it had in dramatically reducing the number of people receiving public assistance, most of whom were women with children. Today, however, more than a decade later, these successes seem far less spectacular. Although the total number of welfare recipients has dropped by more than fifty percent nationwide, evidence shows that poverty has actually deepened. Many hardworking women are no better off for having returned to the workplace. In Doing Without, Jane Henrici brings together nine contributions to tell the story of welfare reform from inside the lives of the women who live with it. Cases from Chicago and Boston are combined with a focus on San Antonio from one of the largest multi-city investigations on welfare reform ever undertaken. The contributors argue that the employment opportunities available to poorer women, particularly single mothers and ethnic minorities, are insufficient to lift their families out of poverty. Typically marked by variable hours, inadequate wages, and short-term assignments, both employment and training programs fail to provide stability or the kinds of benefitsÑsuch as health insurance, sick days, and childcare optionsÑthat are necessary to sustain both work and family life. The chapters also examine the challenges that the women who seek assistance, and those who work in public and private agencies to provide it, together must face as they navigate ever-changing requirements and regulations, decipher alterations in Medicaid, and apply for training and education. Contributors urge that the nation should repair the social safety net for women in transition and offer genuine access to jobs with wages that actually meet the cost of living.

Author : Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Publisher : Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN 13 : 1610445651
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making It Work written by Hirokazu Yoshikawa and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2006-12-07 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Low-skilled women in the 1990s took widely different paths in trying to support their children. Some held good jobs with growth potential, some cycled in and out of low-paying jobs, some worked part time, and others stayed out of the labor force entirely. Scholars have closely analyzed the economic consequences of these varied trajectories, but little research has focused on the consequences of a mother's career path on her children's development. Making It Work, edited by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Thomas Weisner, and Edward Lowe, looks past the economic statistics to illustrate how different employment trajectories affect the social and emotional lives of poor women and their children. Making It Work examines Milwaukee's New Hope program, an experiment testing the effectiveness of an anti-poverty initiative that provided health and child care subsidies, wage supplements, and other services to full-time low-wage workers. Employing parent surveys, teacher reports, child assessment measures, ethnographic studies, and state administrative records, Making It Work provides a detailed picture of how a mother's work trajectory affects her, her family, and her children's school performance, social behavior, and expectations for the future. Rashmita Mistry and Edward D. Lowe find that increases in a mother's income were linked to higher school performance in her children. Without large financial worries, mothers gained extra confidence in their ability to parent, which translated into better test scores and higher teacher appraisals for their children. JoAnn Hsueh finds that the children of women with erratic work schedules and non-standard hours—conditions endemic to the low-skilled labor market—exhibited higher levels of anxiety and depression. Conversely, Noemi Enchautegui-de-Jesus, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Vonnie McLoyd discover that better job quality predicted lower levels of acting-out and withdrawal among children. Perhaps most surprisingly, Anna Gassman-Pines, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Sandra Nay note that as wages for these workers rose, so did their marriage rates, suggesting that those worried about family values should also be concerned with alleviating poverty in America. It is too simplistic to say that parental work is either "good" or "bad" for children. Making It Work gives a nuanced view of how job quality, flexibility, and wages are of the utmost importance for the well-being of low-income parents and children.

Author : Judith Levine
Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520274725
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ain't No Trust written by Judith Levine and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2013-05-25 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ain’t No Trust explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the U.S.—at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers—and presents richly detailed evidence from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it’s failing the very people it is designed to help. By comparing low-income mothers’ experiences before and after welfare reform, Judith A. Levine probes women’s struggles to gain or keep jobs while they simultaneously care for their children, often as single mothers. By offering a new way to understand how structural factors impact the daily experiences of poor women, Ain’t No Trust highlights the pervasiveness of distrust in their lives, uncovering its hidden sources and documenting its most corrosive and paralyzing effects. Levine’s critique and conclusions hold powerful implications for scholars and policymakers alike.

Author : Kathryn Edin
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520241134
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Promises I Can Keep written by Kathryn Edin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-03-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors provide a wholly new framework for understanding why poor women have lower rates of marriage and have children outside of wedlock.